Capital Moves: Rca's Seventy-Year Quest for Cheap Labor

(Paperback)

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Globalization is the lead story of the 21st century, but its roots reach back nearly one hundred years, to major corporations' quest for stable, inexpensive, and pliant sources of labour. Before the largest companies moved beyond national boundaries, they crossed state lines, abandoning the industrial centres of the Eastern Seaboard for impoverished rural communities in the Midwest and South. In their wake they left the decaying urban landscapes and unemployment rates that became hallmarks of late-20th-century America. This is the story that Jefferson Cowie tells through the lens of a single American corporation, RCA. "Capital Moves" takes readers through the interconnected histories of Camden, New Jersey; Bloomington, Indiana; Memphis, Tennessee; and Juarez, Mexico - four cities radically transformed by America's leading manufacturer of records and radio sets. In a sweeping narrative of economic upheaval and class conflict, Cowie weaves together the rich detail of local history with the national - and ultimately international - story of economic and social change.

Reviews

"A conceptually rich and deeply humane book." Michael Kazin, author of The Populist Persuasion: An American History

"Capital Moves is must reading for those who want to understand the forces that have reshaped the American and global economies over the last half-century." Thomas J. Sugrue, University of Pennsylvania

"Capital Moves is a stunningly important work of historical imagination and rediscovery that links the present with the past in a fashion that is exciting and suggestive." Nelson Lichtenstein, University of Virginia

Author Bio

Jefferson Cowie is a professor of labor history and the chair of the department of labor relations, law, and history at Cornell University. He is the author of Capital Moves: RCAs Seventy-Year Quest for Cheap Labor (The New Press), which received the 2000 Philip Taft Prize for the Best Book in Labor History, and of Stayin Alive: The 1970s and the Last Days of the Working Class (The New Press), which received the Francis Parkman Prize for the Best Book in American History from the Society of American Historians and the Merle Curti Award from the Organization of American Historians. He lives in Ithaca, New York.